The Many Puritans of Early New England

Abstract

Every once in a while it is refreshing to see a series of biographies of the Puritans extend its scope beyond the usual Mather/Winthrop/Sewall trinity. Francis J. Bremer has written a series of brief biographies on some of New England's earliest leading lights as well as a longer treatment of the life of New Haven founder John Davenport. While few, if any, of the subjects of these books will be wholly unfamiliar to students of Puritan New England, some are more familiar then others. John Winthrop, whose biography begins First Founders, is, of course, one of the most familiar names from early New England, although Anne Hutchinson and Anne Bradstreet may give him a run for his money among today's college students. Others whose biographies are included here, such as Lady Deborah Moody and Samuel Winthrop, while certainly not obscure, are likely to be less familiar to those who concentrate on areas other than early seventeenth-century New England. Given that Bremer notes in the introduction to First Founders that too often the story of New England is told as if the region were simply Massachusetts (or even Boston) writ large, his decision to focus almost entirely on individuals whose colonial experience was primarily in Massachusetts is strange (p. 2). John Davenport's and Anne Eaton's biographies bring us to New Haven, but Connecticut, Plymouth, and Rhode Island appear only as passing mentions in stories that have their foundation in Massachusetts. Both First Founders and Building a New Jerusalem are very readable works free of jargon and unnecessarily complicated prose. Both invite the reader to imagine the early Puritans as actors on a less parochial stage than nonspecial- ists usually envision. Bremer treats John Winthrop's life in England with as much seriousness as his more well known time in Massachusetts. John's son